strewn in tortured, horrible attitudes in all the
roof-parks, in their homes, in every nook and cranny of the murdered
city. He looked beneath his drifting descent and saw roads that were
rivers, alive with every manner of fleeing conveyance, and he groaned,
knowing that in moments the pursuing ships would send down their
lethal mist to put an end to that futile flight.

Sugar Loaf Mountain rose toward him. At its very summit was a clearing
among the trees, and, incongruously motionless in that world where
every one was rushing from inescapable death, a man stood calmly
there, gazing up at him. Allan screamed down to him! "Run! You fool.
Run or the gas will get you!"

Of course the man could not hear that cry, but one tiny arm rose and
pointed south. Allan followed the direction of the gesture and saw a
black plane veering toward him. Then orange flared from it, though it
was distant, and a wave of intolerable heat enveloped him. Something
cried within him: "Too far--he's too far off to kill me with his
beam!" Then he knew no more.

* * * * *

From New York, from devastated San Francisco, from Rio, from Buenos
Aires, from fifty other desolated points along the seaboards of the
Americas, the black fleets swept along the coasts and inland, vomiting
their yellow death till all the continents were blanketed with
life-destroying gas. And in Europe and Australasia the destroying
hordes, having smashed the proud defenses of the coastlines, engaged
in the same pursuit, till in one short week all the lands of the
Western Allies were swept clear of life. Then the Eastern ships turned
homeward, to wait until the vapor they had strewn had lost its
virulence, and the teeming masses of the East might take possession of
the half world the ebony-painted destroyers had conquered. The black
fliers turned homeward, but there was no homeland left for them to
seek!

For though the defense fleets of the Western Coalition had been
everywhere beaten, their attack squadrons had been everywhere
successful. All Asia and Africa lay under a pall of milky emerald gas
as toxic, as blasting, as the Easterners' yellow.

And the Westerners were returning too!

In their teleview screens the commanders of the black swarms, and of
the white thousands, sought their home ports, and saw the world to be
a haze-covered sphere where not even a fly could live. Then, as if by
common accord, the white ships and the black sped